When Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman set out to make the animated documentary Waltz With Bashir, his father warned him not to do it.

The movie documents Folman's effort to fill in the holes and piece together his unit's role in the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut. Israel's Lebanese Christian allies, the Christian Phalangists, killed the refugees, but Israeli generals engineered it and Israeli soldiers — like Folman — assisted them.

Folman tells NPR's Robert Siegel that his father said "everyone would be furious" about the film, which does not offer a heroic view of the Israeli Army, and that Folman would be "hounded by the government for years."

But Folman went forward with it — as sort of a way of rebelling, he says — in part to convince teenagers to stay away from war.

"For me, it was very essential to bring young audiences to the theaters to watch the film because I thought that if this film could influence even one teenager making the decision not to go the war, it doesn't matter where I did my job, I earned it," Folman says. "All wars are useless … and sometimes in films we tend to glorify them by making all of those great characters and they show you it's all about bravery and brotherhood of man. And I don't believe in that."

Folman specifically used animation to tell the story, he says, because it gave him creative freedom to move from one dimension to another — "from reality to dreams to subconscious issues to hallucinations to drug influences to war, which is probably the most surreal thing on earth," he says.

An emotion that's depicted strongly in the movie is a sense of fear among the Israeli soldiers.

"You're very young and you're totally clueless," Folman says. "The fear is that you don't know if you'll live the next day. And you don't have any decisions that can change it."

Along with reconstructing memory, one of the main points of the movie is chronology, Folman says. During the mass killings, Israeli soldiers like Folman launched flares to assist the Christian Phalangists.

"For us what happened during the massacre in the camp was something that was taken out of our systems because we are not eyewitnessing it," Folman says. "We did ourselves an easy life by saying we didn't know that it was going on. The responsibility was much more a government issue, and us as common soldiers, we were clueless."

But when did the Israeli soldiers realize their role in the massacres? This is something Folman aimed to address.

"When do you realize everything you hear and see ... second- and third-hand information, when do you put everything into one frame and you say, 'OK, there is something very bad, there is mass murder going on just around the hill,'" he says. "And then what do you do in order to prevent it? It's more about chronology of events than about anything else."

To Folman's surprise, the film was received "too well" in Israel.

"I was expecting at least a kind of debate — at least a controversy, something," Folman says. "And then I was hugged dearly by all of the political spectrum, the government took it as a project and they keep sending the film all over the world on their expense. I considered myself this really cool rebel and now I'm the government's darling, so it's kind of problematic for me."

He says the experience shows that Israel is a tolerant country and "in Israel you can say whatever you like." And he kind of enjoys the attention.

"In a way I'm sorry that my father doesn't live to see it," Folman says.

Also, why does the Press & Hussein Obama keep mentioning “2 States in Palestine?” When there’s already 3 states in Palestine: Israel, Jordan, & Gaza. Jordan is the largest State in Palestine, comprising 76% of post-WW I Palestine. In summary, with Jordan and Gaza comprising 77% of Palestine, it clearly does not make sense to carve up Israel to make a 4th State in Palestine; especially one that would be Islamic and harbor terrorists.

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Let me see if I have understood the logic of your point, but put into terms accessible to me.

You have a certain net worth, let's say, one million dollars. I come and take away 23% of your net worth at the point of a gun, leaving you with 77%. If you resist, I call you a terrorists, and drop a phosphorus bomb on your children. Sounds like a good plan to me. I can use $230,000.

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"The Israeli government has launched a television and internet advertising campaign urging Israelis to inform on Jewish friends and relatives abroad who may be in danger of marrying non-Jews.

The advertisements, employing what the Israeli media described as “scare tactics”, are designed to stop assimilation through intermarriage among young diaspora Jews by encouraging them to move to Israel.

The campaign, which cost US$800,000 (Dh2.9 million), was created in response to reports that half of all Jews outside Israel marry non-Jews. It is just one of several initiatives by the Israeli state and private organisations to try to increase the size of Israel’s Jewish population.

According to one of the advertisements, voiced over by one of the country’s leading news anchors, assimilation is “a strategic national threat” and warns that “more than 50 per cent of Diaspora youth assimilate and are lost to us.”

Adam Keller, of Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group, said this was a reference both to a general fear in Israel that the Jewish people may one day disappear through assimilation and to a more specific concern that, if it is to survive, Israel must recruit more Jews to its “demographic war” against Palestinians.

The issue of assimilation has been thrust into the limelight by a series of surveys over several years carried out by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, a think-tank established in Jerusalem in 2002 comprising leading Israeli and diaspora officials.

The institute’s research has shown that Israel is the only country in the world with a significant Jewish population not decreasing in size. The decline elsewhere is ascribed both to low birth rates and to widespread intermarriage.

According to the institute, about half of all Jews in western Europe and the United States assimilate, while the figure for the former Soviet Jewry is reported to reach 80 per cent.

Israel, whose Jewish population of 5.6 million accounts for 41 per cent of worldwide Jewry, has obstructed intermarriage between its Jewish and Arab citizens by refusing to recognise such marriages unless they are performed abroad.

The advertising campaign is directed particularly at Jews in the United States and Canada, whose combined 5.7 million Jews constitutes the world’s largest Jewish population. Most belong to the liberal Reform stream of Judaism that, unlike Orthodoxy, does not oppose intermarriage.

One-third of Jews in the diaspora are believed to have relatives in Israel. According to the campaign’s organisers, more than 200 Israelis rang a hotline to report names of Jews living abroad after the first TV advertisement was run on Wednesday. Callers left details of e-mail addresses and Facebook and Twitter accounts. The 30-second clip featured a series of missing-person posters on street corners, in subways and on telephone boxes showing images of Jewish youths above the word “Lost” in different languages.

A voiceover asks anyone who “knows a young Jew living abroad” to call the hotline. “Together, we will strengthen their connection to Israel, so that we don’t lose them.”

The campaign supports a government-backed programme, Masa, to subsidise stays and courses in Israel of up to one year that seek to persuade Jews to immigrate and become citizens. About 8,000 diaspora Jews attend its programme each year. The government has been trying to develop Masa alongside a rival programme, Birthright Israel, which brings nearly 20,000 diaspora youngsters to Israel each year on sponsored 10-day trips to meet Israeli soldiers and visit sites in Israel and the West Bank promoted as important to the Jewish people.

Although Birthright is regarded as useful in encouraging a positive image of Israel, officials fear it has only a limited effect on attracting its mainly North American participants to move to Israel. Many regard it as an all-paid holiday.

Masa officials said young Jews who participate in their projects strengthened their Jewish identity and were more likely to become politically and socially active on behalf of Israel-related issues.

The campaign quickly provoked a storm of debate on Jewish blog sites, especially in the United States, with some terming it “divisive” and an insult to Jewish offspring of intermarriage. A link to Masa’s “Lost” campaign had been dropped from the front page of its website yesterday, possibly in response to the backlash.

The campaign will probably strike a chord in Israel, however, where a poll in 2007 found that 46 per cent of Israeli Jews believed all Jews should live in Israel because it was “the only way Israel and the Jewish people will be strengthened”.

Mr Keller, of Gush Shalom, said few Jews in the United States or Europe, the main target of the campaign, needed to come to Israel for material reasons. “They come from ideological motives, and many of them are right-wing nationalists who can be encouraged to settle in the West Bank."

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When two years ago I called Ahmadinejad a liar, fraud, and Zionist crypto-Jew, some of you thought I was crazy. Our friend Mr. Sennett stated here that he considered him an honourable man, and suggested that perhaps I was abandoning my anti-Zionist stance.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's vitriolic attacks on the Jewish world hide an astonishing secret, evidence uncovered by The Daily Telegraph shows.

.....................As I have documented before, crypto-Jews have no qualms about pretending to be Mohammedans, Christians, Nazis, White Supremacists, or whatever else is needed to further the Zionist agenda. We have crypto-Jewish Popes, Presidents and Prime Ministers, who infiltrate at the highest levels to subvert a country or religion from within.

Zionist Jews seek to control the whole world and anoint their "leader" (the Antichrist) as their "World Autocrat".

Zionist Jews of course wish to control all countries in preparation for this enthronement of their pseudo-Messiah, so if it is necessary to pretend to be a Mohammedan so as to control Islamic countries, so be it. If it is necessary for a secret-Jew to become Pope to guide over a billion Roman Catholics on the wrong path toward worship of the Antichrist, so be it. If it is necessary for a Zionist crypto-Jew to pretend to become a "born-again Christian" so as to secure a post in the U.S. presidency, so be it.

Ahmadinejad has finally been revealed to be a crypto-Jew who outwardly pretends to be a Muslim, while secretly working to advance the goals of world Jewry. This is a page right out of the playbook of Hitler, another Zionist crypto-Jew who pretended to despise Jews but secretly was working hand in hand with the powerful Zionist bankers to enact their world programme, as outlined in the Protocols.

If you ignore what frauds like Ahmadinejad and Hitler say on the face of it, and instead focus on what their rhetoric and policies actually accomplish towards the fulfillment of the schemes of the Jews, you will quickly realize that they are secretly working to advance the Jewish programme, and not in actuality working to undo it.

Hitler's and Göring's Nuremberg laws were ostensibly enacted to preserve and protect the "Aryan race," i.e. the Germanic blood, by preventing Jews and non-Jews from intermarriage.

Of course this is the propaganda that has been spoon-fed to the world by the Jewish media titans. But the secretly-Jewish Hitler, with his dark brown eyes, was lying, and was actually trying to keep Jews and non-Jews apart because he was a Zionist that really wanted to preserve the Jewish (i.e. "Aryan") blood pure. The same policy is practiced in Palestine (i.e. so-called Israel) to this day. Jews and Palestinians are not allowed to marry, just like in Hitler's Third Reich.

Herr Hitler's goal was to preserve and protect the Jewish blood, not Germanic blood. Of course the Zionists could not come out and admit this, for everyone would see them for the racists that they truly are.

So what to do? Why not deceive the world by lying and claiming that the goal is to preserve the so-called blue-eyed, blond Aryan race? That way the Zionist Jews can portray the Germans as the racists, and the Jews as the poor victims, but all the while accomplishing the same goal--which all along was to keep Jewish blood separate from non-Jewish blood.

Did Hitler truly believe the blond, blue-eyed Germanic people to be the superior race as he pretended? Hitler had dark hair and dark brown eyes, not blond hair and blue eyes. So by his own standards, Hitler was of an inferior race--if we were to actually take his words at face value, which of course we should not.

Hitler was a Zionist crypto-Jew working for the advancement of the programme outlined in the Protocols of Sion just like his successor, Ahmadinejad.

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Yes, that was a long time ago, and I had forgotten about it, but thanks for finally clearing it up.

It is very difficult for ordinary folk like me to bring oneself into that kind of thinking. I did of course know that Hitler had some kind of Jewish connection, and recently read about Ahmadinejad. And of course it did cause me to wonder about it all. But there are many examples of atrocious human behaviour which forever remains a mystery in its outlandishness. It just is, perhaps a mental disease or sin or possession or whatever you want to call it?

But to say that Hitler was actually trying to preserve and keep Jewish blood pure, is hard for me to accept. That would be the biggest fraud ever, which my mind just can't accept; but I will keep thinking about it, and observe.

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